With the current state of identity theft, uncontrolled data collection and targeted marketing, there is a need for a user to protect their primary identity and to compartmentalize their online activity. For example, the user might prefer to use their primary identity for general browsing or reading online newspapers, separated from accessing and commenting on social media, separated from purchasing from e-commerce applications, and separated from selling their furniture on eBay®.
One method to achieve this separation (or compartmentalization) is to allow a user to create multiple personas and then use them for different purposes. Each persona would have its own identity attributes which may include name, address, date of birth, phone, email, credit and delivery address. Each persona should be used for a limited and specific purpose. Consequently, tracking of that identity would not form a complete picture of the user's activity. The personas act as a personal privacy proxy, not allowing Internet services access to the user's primary identity.
One limitation when using personas from a single device, e.g., mobile, desktop, or from multiple devices attached to the same network, is that the network address (IP address) can be used for persona tracking. The network address reveals information about the user's personas, e.g., personas are related, a persona and a primary identity are related, a persona exists at a certain physical location.
Through the direct connection from a user's device to an Internet server, the Internet server has access to the device's IP address and can correlate personas or can do a simple reverse lookup of IP address to retrieve location. The location information is very accurate. While the IP address may come directly from the device, it may be that the user's device or devices are behind a firewall that provides a network address translation (NAT) service. Although the NAT stops the original IP address from being visible, it doesn't reduce the ability to track personas.
Tracking of the IP address allows Internet sites to profile personas and primary identity. This in turn allows the Internet service to customize marketing messages, customize pricing, record a persona's browsing habits, and so on. By itself an IP address provides a lot of useful information to an organization trying to profile and track a particular user.
A solution is therefore required to provide masking of the persona's IP address to thwart the tracking of personas. It is important that the solution allows the IP address to be different for each persona. Also because persona supporting applications are used by technically unskilled (normal) users the solution should provide protection without having a major impact on the user experience. The solution should automate the masking of the IP address without requiring constant vigilance of the user